At 53 and 44, Two Brazilian Tennis Veterans Returned to the Pro Game and Made World Record History
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Paulo Camargo and Lucas Feltes Engel became the oldest men’s doubles team in professional tennis history to compete in an ITF main draw with ATP ranking points after returning to professional competition in Maringá, Brazil.
By Atlas Editorial Team
22 August 2026 • Maringá [Brazil]
Paulo Camargo and Lucas Engel 
Paulo Camargo and Lucas Engel Paulo Camargo and Lucas Engel
The Return
Professional tennis has a simple and unsentimental relationship with time. The ball does not slow down because your knees hurt. The baseline does not move closer because you have jobs, scars or a few more decades behind you. The younger man on the other side of the net is not required to care about your story.
Paulo Camargo knew all of this when he decided he wanted back in.
His explanation for returning was simpler than any record calculation or ranking table.
“I wanted to feel alive again.”
Camargo had already lived several tennis lives. A motorcycle accident at 18 interrupted his original pursuit of professional tennis. Years later, after periods of personal and financial hardship, he returned to the sport and eventually reached No. 706 in the ATP doubles rankings. Lucas Feltes Engel had his own professional career and his own reasons to understand that a sporting life rarely moves in a straight line.
The two men had met while playing professionally and became training partners and close friends. Paulo credits Lucas with helping him through critical stages of his career. So when the idea came to return to professional competition years later, there was never much question about who should be standing on the other side of the net.
“I couldn't have asked anyone else,” Paulo said.
Lucas did not require much convincing.
“When he invited me to join this project, I didn't hesitate for a second.”
There was, however, the inconvenient matter of reality.
Both men now work as tennis coaches, often eight to ten hours a day. Preparing for professional competition meant training during lunch breaks and whatever fragments of the day normally belonged to rest. They sacrificed meals, sleep and recovery time. Their bodies objected.
Lucas had also survived cancer. Paulo carried the history of the accident that had once taken tennis away from him. And around them were people offering the sort of sensible advice that has probably prevented a great many extraordinary things from ever happening.
They were too old, they were told.
The idea was crazy.
They kept training.
The Court Does Not Negotiate
On May 13, 2026, at the ITF M15 tournament in Maringá, Paraná, Paulo Camargo and Lucas Feltes Engel entered the men's doubles main draw together.
Camargo was 53. Engel was 44.
By then, something strange had begun happening around them. During practice, spectators approached for photographs. Children asked for autographs. Younger players watched them with what the pair remembers as a combination of admiration and disbelief.
For a little while, they said, it felt as though time had reversed.
“It made us feel alive and young again — as if we had traveled back in time.”
Then time reminded them that it had not.
At the end of the warm-up before their match, Paulo says he stepped on a tennis ball and fell, suffering serious injuries to his shoulder. Lucas was also dealing with an injured elbow. They took the court anyway.
Their opponents, Victor Braga and Rafael Tosetto, beat them 6–0, 6–0.
There is no romantic interpretation of that score. Professional tennis is useful that way. It records what happened and has little interest in what it meant.
But the record Paulo and Lucas were pursuing was never about winning the match.
It was about getting there.
Atlas World Records verified that the pair competed together in the main doubles draw of the M15 Maringá, an official ITF professional tournament. M15 tournaments offer ATP doubles ranking points beginning at designated point-awarding rounds; Paulo and Lucas did not earn ATP ranking points from their first-round result, but the event itself formed part of the professional ranking pathway in which ATP points were available.
Together, the two men had a combined age of approximately 98 years and three months.
And that is where the ordinary-looking first-round match became something else.
Not Finished
Atlas World Records conducted a worldwide benchmark investigation across professional tennis competition, including the ITF World Tennis Tour and its predecessor structures, ATP Challenger and ATP Tour competition, historical professional doubles results and publicly documented record claims.
No older men's doubles pairing was identified competing together in a comparable open professional main draw.
Some famous veteran doubles teams came close by the standards of elite sport, but not particularly close to Paulo and Lucas. John McEnroe and Jonas Björkman, for example, were approximately 81 years old in combined age when they played together in San Jose in 2006. Other prominent veteran pairings similarly remained well below the Brazilian team's combined age. Much older doubles partnerships do exist in senior, age-restricted and exhibition tennis, but those competitions are fundamentally different from an open professional ranking event and were excluded from the record category.
The result is an unusual world record because the achievement is not really about longevity alone.
It is about returning.
Lucas's return followed cancer and personal loss. Paulo's began much earlier, with the motorcycle accident that derailed his first attempt at a professional career at 18. He has described the years that followed as some of the hardest of his life before eventually returning to tennis at 30 and building himself into a world-ranked player.
That journey became the subject of Paulo's book, Até Onde Você Iria?, which recounts the life story now being adapted for film. The title translates roughly as How Far Would You Go? — a question that feels particularly appropriate for a man who, decades after his first professional ambitions appeared to have ended, found himself walking onto a professional court again at 53.
For Paulo, the record is another chapter in the same story.
“I hope this record shows everyone that neither age nor adversity can stop a dreamer with a vision,” he said.
Neither man considers Maringá an ending.
Paulo says they intend to keep competing until they earn ranking points and return to the world rankings. Lucas is more measured about the realities of recovery and injury, but says they intend to continue for as long as their bodies permit.
That may ultimately be the more interesting thing about this record.
At 53 and 44, Paulo Camargo and Lucas Feltes Engel did not return to professional tennis to commemorate what they once were.
They returned because they were not finished.
Certified by Atlas World Records on 22 August 2026